Personal Profile
Fei-Fei Li (English name: Fei-Fei Li), born in 1976, is a Chinese-American computer scientist best known for creating ImageNet, a dataset that enabled rapid progress in computer vision in the 2010s.
She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and a former board director of Twitter. Fei-Fei Li is the co-director of the Stanford HAI Institute and the co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. From 2013 to 2018, she served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).
In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving diversity and inclusion in the field of artificial intelligence. Her research expertise includes artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and cognitive neuroscience.
For her contributions to building large-scale knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding, Fei-Fei Li was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2020. She is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).
Early Life and Education
Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu. At the age of 12, her father moved to the United States. At the age of 15, she and her mother reunited with her father in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. She graduated from Parsippany High School in 1995, and in 2017 she was inducted into the Parsippany High School Hall of Fame.
In 1999, she graduated with honors from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in physics and certificates in applied and computational mathematics and engineering physics. Under the guidance of electrical engineering professor Bradley Dickinson, she completed her thesis titled "Auditory Binaural Correlogram Difference: A New Computational Model for Huggins Dichotic Pitch". Subsequently, Fei-Fei Li pursued graduate studies at Caltech and received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2005.
Work Experience
From 2005 to August 2009, Fei-Fei Li served as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, respectively. She joined Stanford University in 2009 as an assistant professor, was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2012, and to full professor in 2017. At Stanford University, Fei-Fei Li served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018. Together with Dr. John Etchemendy, former provost of Stanford University, she became the founding co-director of Stanford University's university-level initiative – the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HAI).
During her leave from Stanford University from January 2017 to the fall of 2018, Fei-Fei Li joined Google Cloud as its chief scientist and vice president of AI/ML. At Google, her team focused on democratizing AI technology, lowering the barriers to entry for businesses and developers, including the development of products such as AutoML. In the fall of 2018, Fei-Fei Li left Google and returned to Stanford University to continue her professorship.
As the co-founder and chair of the nonprofit organization AI4ALL, Fei-Fei Li is also known for her nonprofit work. The organization's mission is to promote diversity and inclusion through human-centered AI principles and to educate the next generation of AI technologists, thinkers, and leaders.
Before founding AI4ALL in 2017, Fei-Fei Li and her former student Olga Russakovsky (currently an assistant professor at Princeton University) co-founded and co-directed a pilot program at Stanford University called SAILORS (Stanford AI Lab OutReach Summers). SAILORS was Stanford's annual summer camp dedicated to AI education and research for ninth-grade high school girls, established in 2015 and renamed AI4ALL @Stanford in 2017. In 2018, in addition to Stanford University, AI4ALL successfully launched five more summer programs, including at Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, UC Berkeley, and Simon Fraser University in Canada.